Racist Great Replacement Conspiracy Went From Alt-Right to Mainstream

The belief that immigrants arrive in the United States with the intent to "steal" has been ubiquitous in right-wing politics for decades: Immigrants have been accused of stealing jobs, stealing tax dollars, and stealing benefits. But lately, some of the GOP's most stalwart voices have drummed up a more explicit accusation that immigrants are here to steal the very essence of America and replace it with something foreign an idea plucked directly from far right wing media.

This week, Fox News' Tucker Carlson, who frequently promotes white supremacist talking points, made an adamant declaration during the Fox News Primetime show that Democrats were using immigration as part of a plan to "replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World" and that no one should "sit back and take that." It was the most explicit endorsement of the "great replacement" theory in Carlson's long history of white nationalism, and the segment drew an immediate backlash, including a statement from the Anti-Defamation League calling for Fox News to fire Carlson.

In the face of public backlash and advertiser boycotts Fox has encouraged advertisers to move their money from the opinion shows to Fox's other programming, branding their non-primetime and "news" shows as "safe" from the public relations nightmare of their "opinion" shows. Carlson's raving about great replacement took place not on his own show but on Fox News Primetime, where several companies that had previously pulled or refused to run ads on Tucker Carlson Tonight, aired ads that very same night.

The following night, Carlson doubled down on his remarks as white nationalists celebrated the broadcast and endorsement of their long held conspiracy theories on the most-watched cable news channel in the country.

The white nationalist "great replacement" conspiracy theory was popularized by French writer Renaud Camus in his 2012 book Le Grand Remplacement. Often intermingled with a "white genocide" conspiracy theory, it proposes that a variety of factors, such as an influx of nonwhite immigrants, multiculturalism, and falling birthrates among white Europeans, will result in white populations losing their position as the dominant demographic.

The conspiracy theory creates a dangerous dynamic in which believers view immigrants and nonwhite citizens as an existential threat to their communities. And the theory is not a purely academic endeavor; it seeks to mobilize believers into action against their supposed "replacement." This mobilization manifests itself in various ways, including political activism against immigration, efforts to encourage white women to have more children to bolster demographic growth, and, in an extreme form, deadly violence against immigrants and communities of color.

The theory has reared its head in violent outbursts such as the murder of 51 people at the Al Noor mosque and Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch, New Zealand, the killing of more than 20 mostly Hispanic shoppers in El Paso, Texas, and the screams of angry young men who shouted "Jews will not replace us; you will not replace us" at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where antiracist demonstrator Heather Heyer was murdered by neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. Field's online behavior before Unite the Right indictes support for Nazi ideology and white racial purity. There is a clear link between the rhetoric broadcast to viewers via mainstream shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight and the beliefs espoused by mass shooters motivated by the theory; in some cases, the language overlaps with striking parallels.

Elements of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory have also recently appeared in the statements of prominent conservative politicians. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) recently appeared on Fox News' Justice with Judge Jeanine and said that Black Lives Matter protests were part of "an attempted cultural genocide going on in America right now." Gaetz claimed that "the left wants us to be ashamed of America so that they can replace America," a message he later repeated on Twitter:

It's no coincidence that Gaetz echoed the "great replacement" talking points on Fox, as the network has played a role in promoting the conspiracy theory to American conservative audiences for years.

Fox News is home to a near-constant stream of claims that America is being subjected to an immigrant "invasion." Hosts and contributors including Brian Kilmeade, Stuart Varney, Pete Hegseth, Tomi Lahren, and Mike Huckabee have repeatedly fear mongered about a supposed "invasion" of the United States' southern border by migrants seeking asylum.

The vitriolic talking point has become ubiquitous in Fox's lineup; a Media Matters study last year found that Fox made over 70 on-air references to an "invasion" by migrants over the seven months leading up to the El Paso mass shooting, in which the perpetrator said he was responding to a "Hispanic invasion of Texas."

In addition to the open racism of its "invasion" talking point, Fox News regularly pushes the claim that Americans are being replaced by immigrants in order to benefit Democrats at the ballot box. On The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham warned in 2018 that Democrats "want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants." This May, Ingraham boosted an article from the white nationalist website VDare that attempted to link immigration to coronavirus hotspots.

Carlson tried to alarm audiences in July 2018 by saying that "Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country." In January 2020, he declared that the "long-term agenda of refugee resettlement is to bring in future Democratic voters, obviously."

With the entrance of a new administration, Carlson and Fox have doubled down on hysterical claims and misinformation around immigration, particularly at the southern border.

This year Carlson has claimed the immigrants currently in America "devalue your political power as a voter" and "subvert democracy itself." He declared asylum-seekers "a human tragedy for everyone involved and a tragedy for those of us who live here," warning that immigration will "change your country forever, possibly for the worse." Carlson regularly tells viewers that allowing immigrants to settle in the United States is a way to "punish" the people who already live here.

And the rhetoric isn't limited to Carlson. The replacement theory is now a staple in right-wing media's coverage of immigration.

Fox host Jeanine Pirro got to the crux of the "great replacement" theory last August when she claimed: "It is a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats."

And this sort of racist conspiracy theorizing extends beyond Fox.

Following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Ingraham broadcast an unhinged rant claiming immigrants were the real insurrectionists.

Podcast host Bill O'Reilly warned that undocumented immigration would cause "traditional America to vanish."

Conservative writer David Horowitz accused the left of waging a "war on America's sovereignty" through immigration.

Longtime conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh stated in 2018 that immigration from Latin America was intended to "dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture. ... This is why people call this an invasion."

On Sean Hannity's radio show, Bill O'Reilly warned that undocumented immigration will cause "traditional America to vanish"

Far-right author Ann Coulter titled her 2015 anti-immigration book Adios America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.

Radio host Michael Savage said America was "being invaded by a far more virile people" and called for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a US citizen, to be deported "for what she's done in this country." The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles accused the left of attempting to "radically change American culture" through immigration in order to "flood this country with people who will -- are more likely to support them politically."

As the language of "great replacement" has become commonplace throughout right-wing media, the rhetoric has also made the leap from commentators to policymakers. President Donald Trump himself retweeted proponents of the theory even before the 2016 election, and in 2018 he directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the baseless conspiracy theory that genocide is being committed against white farmers in South Africa -- a policy that originated in a segment on Carlson's prime-time Fox News show.

Last November, a trove of emails leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed the extent of White House adviser Stephen Miller's sympathies for white nationalism. Miller repeatedly spoke of immigration in a way that would be recognizable to proponents of the great replacement theory, often referring to demographic changes in the context of immigration.

In one email to former Breitbart Editor Katie McHugh, Miller lamented the effects of the Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated race-based immigration quotas, writing that in modern politics "immigration is something that we can only vote to have more of immigration 'reform' is a moral imperative but it's impossible, evil, racist to reverse immigration."

From Carlson's nightly broadcasts to Matt Gaetz's national stage to the local politics of Florida's state Senate, conservative figures are now cheering on policies using language evoking the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, and their promotion of these talking points as an electoral issue means the hawkish anti-immigrant rhetoric that used to live primarily in fringe conservative media spaces is now a staple of conservative politics.

Allowing immigration policy, and our national discourse surrounding race relations, to be shaped by white nationalistnativist conspiracy theories that have already proved deadly both in the United States and abroad endangers the well-being of everyone in the United States. Right wing media and the conservative establishments' failure to stamp out racist, conspiratorial rhetoric from their midst has emboldened bad actors and legitimized a hateful ideology couched in white supremacy.

Nikki is a researcher at Media Matters for America, she can be found on Twitter @NikkiMcR.

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Racist Great Replacement Conspiracy Went From Alt-Right to Mainstream